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Comments on Shuffle a subset of a list [FINALIZED]

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Shuffle a subset of a list [FINALIZED]

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Idea shamelessly stolen from caird and rak1507

Shuffle a subset of a list of unique, positive integers with uniform randomness, given the indices of that subset. For example, given the list $[A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H]$ and the indices $[0, 3, 4, 5, 7]$ (0-indexed), you would extract the list $[A, D, E, F, H]$, shuffle it, and insert the shuffled elements back according to the list of indices. Some possible results of this are (elements that stayed in place are bolded) $$[H, \textbf{B}, \textbf{C}, D, A, E, \textbf{G}, F]$$ $$[A, \textbf{B}, \textbf{C}, D, E, F, \textbf{G}, H]$$ $$[F, \textbf{B}, \textbf{C}, E, A, H, \textbf{G}, D]$$.

Rules

  • Every possible rearrangement of the list should have a non-zero chance of being chosen.
  • You may use zero- or one-indexing, but please specify which you use.
  • The indices in the input are guaranteed to be unique and valid.
  • This is [tag:code-golf], so least number of bytes wins.

Test cases

All of these examples use 0-indexing.

List
Indices
Possible output

[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
[0,1,2,3,4,5,6]
[2,3,6,1,0,4,5], etc.

[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
[0,2,4,6]
[3,2,7,4,5,6,1], etc.

[93,6,10,1,200,41,78,31,34,27]
[0,3,4,8,9]
[1,6,10,27,93,41,78,31,200,34], etc.

Questions for Meta:

  • How do I enforce randomness?
  • Is this a dupe?
  • Is this uninteresting?
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1 comment thread

General comments (5 comments)
General comments
Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago

Is there a mistake in your example? Given $[A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H]$, the 0th index is A and the 5th index is F, so the subset to shuffle would be $[A, B, C, D, E]$.

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago

In any case, to address your questions: Plenty of languages have some sort of randomness function, it's probably fine to just leave the specification as (uniformly) random. This is not a dupe. Also, I personally find it interesting, so there's that.

user‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@Moshi Thanks for reviewing my draft! About your first comment - that's not a mistake, the 5 is exclusive, but I'm removing that part anyway, since it won't be a contiguous subset anymore.

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@user Even if it's exclusive, $[A, B, C, D]$ are the elements 0, 1, 2, 3; so it ends at 4 not 5. Not that it really matters though if you're changing it to any subset. Though if you'll allow any subset, what would the input be? An array and array of indices?

user‭ wrote over 3 years ago

Moshi‭ Whoops, didn't realize that. Off-by-one errors are the two things I hate most :P. And yes, the input will be an array and a set of indices.